Tour de France organisers ASO have roundly rejected the idea that fans could be obliged to pay for roadside access to key segments of races.
Payment for access to road races, as already happens with many track events, is an idea which has been circulating for years, but it regained prominence last week when it was pitched by former team manager Jérôme Pineau on the Grand Plateau podcast.
Pineau pointed to the double ascent of Alpe d'Huez in next year's Tour de France over two days as one prime candidate for a ticketing system, suggesting that it could be a way of strengthening cycling's fragile financial model for teams.
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"Why not make people pay for access to the last parts of the high mountain?" Pineau asked rhetorically.
"If we charge people for the last five kilometres, that would generate a really nice amount of money for the teams without affecting the spectacle."
VIP tents are already a regular feature both in cyclocross and in some one-day races like the Tour of Flanders, which in 2026 will charge over €700 for its most expensive 'Grandstand experience' in the race. Back in 2023, Visma-Lease a Bike team manager Richard Plugge suggested that fans could pay a much more modest €10 for access to fenced-off segments of mountains, although at the time he viewed it more as a deposit as a way to deter crashes rather than a source of income.
"Maybe you should ask for €10 to go on the mountain because yesterday on Col de Joux Plane was really hectic as well," he told Cycling Weekly.
"Maybe you should ask for €10 and you get it back when you come down if nothing happens."
There have also been calls in recent months for more races to be held on circuits as a way of discouraging disruption by protests, such as those which caused several parts of the Vuelta a España to be suspended or cancelled.
However, when asked by Dernière Heure, an ASO official gave the whole concept short shrift, arguing that paid entrances would affect cycling's underlying principle of 'access for all'.
"In its essence, cycling is free [for spectators] and bringing in a ticketing system is absolutely not on the current agenda," Pierre-Yves Thoualt, deputy director of ASO's cycling section, told the Belgian newspaper.
His words were echoed by longstanding Groupama-FDJ manager Marc Madiot, as well as former AG2R La Mondiale team boss Vincent Lavenu and Jayco-AlUla sports director Valerio Piva in the same article.
"Cycling is a free sport and that helps it to succeed," Madiot told Dernière Heure, "Let's keep it that way."
However, the recent collapse of the Arkéa-B&B Hotels team after its sponsors pulled out, as well as the remorseless widening of the gap in budgets between the biggest and smallest WorldTour teams make it increasingly tough for some squads to remain competitive, Lavenu pointed out. As a result, Lavenu argued, it was necessary to find more reliable income streams long-term or perhaps to impose a salary cap.
"Right now there are state-sponsored teams or those that are supported by multinationals which have unlimited budgets and others who are fighting to maintain their sponsors' support and who find their backers are increasingly unwilling to loosen their purse strings," Lavenu said.
"Cycling depends too much on its sponsors. Teams don't benefit either from TV rights like in football or from ticketing systems."
"On paper, it [ticketing systems] is a good idea if those hosting the race are generous with the teams," Piva added.
"In the Tour of Flanders or at Amstel, that money just goes straight to the organisers. I don't think it'd be any different if we had a similar system in place at stage races."
